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Forwarded from i am

“a decision by magistrates whether to issue a summons pursuant to information laid involves the exercise of a judicial function, and is not merely administrative.” See All England Law Reports [1975] 2 All ER QBD p206-207.

Lord Chief Justice Widgery was ruling on the affixing of a judge’s signature by rubber stamp – and magistrates’ summons issued by the council are not individually signed by judges, and so a rubber stamp or photocopy is used. He said:

“It is perfectly proper for a signature to be affixed by way of rubber stamp, whether applied by the justice or by a clerk or an employee of the magistrates’ clerk with the authority, general or specific, of the justice, and that conclusion, but for one matter, would be sufficient in my view to dispose of this application, because assuming that an information was indeed laid before the justice whose signature in facsimile form subsequently appeared on the summons then all the applicant’s attack on the subsequent proceedings would fall to the ground straight away and it would not be necessary to consider the other points raised in this application. However in this case it may be that, as the applicant I think wished this court to infer from the document before it, the justice before whom the information was originally laid was not the one whose signature appeared on the summons in facsimile form, and indeed I think the applicant would go further and say that this court should infer in all the circumstances of this case and proceeded on the basis that no information was ever placed before any justice prior to the issue of the summons; the summons was a mere creature of a clerk in the magistrates’ court office. It is not necessary to embark on an examination of that aspect of the matter; indeed this court would be quite unable to do so in view of the material before it, but counsel for the justices conceded certainly that if the summons had come into existence in the manner which I last referred to, namely as a purely administrative operation without any information being laid, then the summons would be bad … before a summons or warrant is issued the information must be laid before a magistrate and he must go through the judicial exercise of deciding whether a summons or warrant ought to be issued or not. If a magistrate authorises the issue of a summons without having applied his mind to the information then he is guilty of dereliction of duty and if in any particular justices’ clerk’s office a practice goes on of summonses being issued without information being laid before the magistrate at all, then a very serious instance of maladministration arises which should have the attention of the authorities without delay”.

These non payment of council tax summonses are issued, generally, by a council’s computer. It is not credible to believe that a magistrate has reviewed the information before the computer sends out the letter. The court cases are handled in great bulk – thousands at a time, and I believe this is just an administrative summons, with no judicial aspect at all. It may be that magistrates have given images of their signatures to Councils for their computer to use to generate summonses, as council tax case summonses are issued by the council, and not by the court, tending to show that there is no real judicial oversight. No magistrate has the legal right to give a Council the power to issue summonses without proper adjudication in each case, by a magistrate (and not by the magistrate’s clerk or the council computer system), of whether there is grounds to issue a summons in the first place. While the clerk may affix the signature by rubber stamp, or the computer simply paste in a facsimile of the signature, there must be a real live magistrate reviewing the summons before it is sent out.

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